


Team Building

by onward_came_the_meteors



Series: October 2020 Prompts [1]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Desperate times call for desperate measures, Friendship, Gen, Humor, Imprisonment, Kidnapping, One Shot, POV Third Person, Post-Avengers (2012), Team Bonding, Team Dynamics, well for us not for them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2020-10-01
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:55:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26749123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onward_came_the_meteors/pseuds/onward_came_the_meteors
Summary: The Avengers are trapped, and the water is rising.
Relationships: Bruce Banner & Clint Barton & Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov & Tony Stark & Thor
Series: October 2020 Prompts [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1947679
Comments: 14
Kudos: 56





	Team Building

**Author's Note:**

> Day 1, for the prompt "waking up restrained."

Clint didn’t particularly want to open his eyes, but being unconscious was starting to get old.

Besides, the sounds of groans and shifting from around him meant that the others were also beginning to stir, and damn it if he would be the last one awake.

He peeled his eyes open to be met with almost complete darkness, a hard wall at his back to match the floor he had been tossed aside on like an empty sack. Everything felt grimy and dirty, like the grit was oozing its way beneath his skin to mix with the drying blood and beads of sweat. And there was a very persistent pain in his wrists that was almost immediately revealed to be from the restraints that were tied so tightly he wondered if his hands were going to fall off.

In short, it was all the ingredients of a kidnapping; something Clint had been no stranger to as an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. (and before that, but why look back?), and something that hadn’t changed one bit since joining the Avengers. In fact, he probably got captured  _ more  _ often now—enemies apparently didn’t expect Hawkeye to fight back with the same ferocity as… oh, Thor, for instance… and so he usually ended up being the target for as long as he needed to be before he got bored and escaped.

This time, though, he wasn’t alone, and the faint sound of dripping in the distance gave him the bad feeling that this wasn’t a normal kidnapping.

Something bumped against his leg, and he squinted in the dark before he recognized Natasha, her wrists tied like his and an impressive bruise staining her cheek.

“Up and at ‘em, Barton,” she said, already working at her restraints. “Whoever got us this time won’t leave us alone for long.” There was a pause, and then she added, as though a second thought: “You okay?”

“Yep.” Clint groaned as he pulled himself upward into a sitting position. He must already have been knocked out when they’d thrown him onto the floor, otherwise he would’ve been able to cushion himself. “How many?”

“All six, but you can see for yourself.” Natasha nodded to the other dark shapes lumped among them, some of which were starting to move.

“Natasha? Is that you?” Steve lifted his head, blinking like something was caught in his eye. “What happened?”

“JARVIS?” Tony asked at the same moment. “Where are we and how soon can—oh.” He was still lying on the floor—his and Steve’s wrists just as tied as Clint’s and Natasha’s—but he managed to wriggle onto his side. The light from the arc reactor spilled out and cast a blue glow in a circle on the floor. “Shit. They took my—well, they took everything, unless I’m wrong about the places Barton can stick a bow.”

Clint loosened one of the knots on his wrists. “You know, I was going to ask if you were all right, but now I’m reconsidering if that’s really something I’m invested in.”

“Come on. I made you that new set of arrows last week.”

“Well, sometimes a guy just wants regular arrows, not sentient ones with a personality that makes me feel bad for shooting them.”

“But you’ve gotta admit the targeting system is top-notch.” Tony gave his best version of the raised-eyebrows I’m-Tony-Stark confidence look, but it was marred by the dirt smeared across his face and the sweat pressing his hair down in messy strands across his forehead. 

Clint shrugged; a few feet away, Steve lurched upward, throwing himself into an odd sort of hop to get on his feet while his tied hands flopped uselessly in front of him. He fell heavily against the wall with a muffled grunt, and would probably have slid right back down to the floor had the shadowy form of Thor not jumped up and steadied him.

Steadied him with freed hands, Clint observed, and was about to open his mouth when Tony beat him to it.

“Hey, where does Hammer Time get off with no restraints? I didn’t think playing favorites with prisoners was an acceptable bad-guy tactic.”

Thor raised his arms, displaying the ripped remains of the restraints that hung limply around his wrists. “You mean these restraints?”

Clint swore as his fingers slipped in the knots of his own, slick with sweat and grime. “Man, you really know how to make us feel better about ourselves.”

“Where’s Bruce?” Natasha asked, standing up and dropping what was left of her restraints on the ground. Clint winced as he spotted the raw skin around her wrists where they had been, but Natasha acted like they weren’t there—although her hand did brush across one of the marks for a brief second.

“Right here,” a weak voice called from somewhere in the shadows behind Thor, dashing all of Clint’s hopes that the Hulk was about to burst through the walls and save them. “Although… where is here?”

“Excellent question.” Steve pulled his wrists apart, once, twice, and the restraints snapped in two. He shrugged off Thor’s support even if he was still leaning more of his weight against the wall than was normal. “Anybody got an answer?”

Tony raised his hand. “I’ll take ‘Creepy Villain Lairs’ for four hundred?”

“The last thing I remember is waiting for Stark’s driver to pick us up and take us back to the Tower,” Thor said, frowning. “After that… it all becomes cloudy.”

_ Yeah, that’s typical. _

Clint slid out of his restraints and pushed himself up with complaining muscles. “All right then. So which of you pissed off someone powerful and unbalanced recently?” He arched his eyebrows meaningfully at Steve and Tony.

Before the two of them could start arguing—Tony was already opening his mouth to defend himself and Steve was already narrowing his eyes—Natasha stepped in. “If they were only out to get a single one of us, we all wouldn’t be here. It wouldn’t be worth the effort otherwise. Somebody’s got a grudge against the Avengers.” She shrugged, and a wry smile glinted on her lips. “Much as I can’t imagine why.”

“Still bet it was Tony’s fault,” Steve said under his breath, but he grinned as Tony aimed a halfhearted kick at him from where he was still struggling with the restraints on the floor.

“Perhaps we should focus less on how we got in here and instead on how we’re going to get out,” Thor suggested. He hit a fist against the walls, which echoed with a dull  _ thud.  _ “Not that way, I don’t think.”

Clint spun around, trained eyes taking in every detail of the cramped, dark, room. “Yeah, I don’t see any—”

“Guys?” That was Bruce, his wrists still tied but having shifted into an awkward sitting position. “Do any of you hear that?”

Everyone went quiet, making the sound that Clint had been trying to ignore for the past few minutes in the vain hope that it wouldn’t be what he thought it was even more obvious.

_ Drip. _

_ Drip.  _

_ Drip.  _

_ Drip. _

“It’s getting faster,” Tony muttered. 

_ Drip. _

_ Drip. _

_ Drip. _

_ Drip. _

“I think you’re right.”

“What, you mean you were doubting me?”

But Tony’s heart wasn’t in the retort, and Clint watched carefully as his eyes tracked the sound to a small drain in the floor a few feet away, and then another by the opposite wall, and then two more—

There were eight drains in the room, and as they watched, the one nearest to them was starting to fill with a shallow puddle of water. Thin droplets leaked out and began to trickle down toward their feet, and it was then that Clint realized that the room was at a slope.

“Well. Shit,” Natasha breathed.

As though in response, a wet gurgle bubbled from the drains, and more water began rising out, causing the little trickles to become steady streams that raced each other down to where the Avengers stood huddled in a clump.

Clint knew he should be doing something, but his body felt frozen, and he watched with detachment as a rivulet of water dribbled, slowly but surely, down to his shoe.

And it  _ burned. _

Clint must have gasped, even if he wasn’t aware of it, and that was apparently all the others needed to snap into action. All of a sudden, Natasha was shoving him forward, yelling “Move!” and Steve and Thor had broken Tony’s and Bruce’s restraints, and they were all hurrying as fast as they could to the center of the room, where a small platform gradually sloped up until it was at least four or five feet above the corners.

Why the room was designed this way, Clint didn’t want to think about, but there was something to be said about the mental processes of the types of people who were insane enough to kidnap the Avengers.

The center platform was just big enough for them all to stand with a little room to spare, but Clint immediately knelt down and pulled off his shoe to examine it. He could feel everyone watching him, but all other thoughts were wiped from his mind when he saw the faint trail of smoke rising from the tip, where the rubber had been eaten away by… okay, he didn’t know  _ what  _ was in that water, but he was sure as hell not going to touch it again to find out. This was one scientific discovery that could be left  _ un _ discovered.

From the way both Tony and Bruce were eyeing the water now practically gushing up from the drains, he got the feeling his opinion wasn’t unanimous.

“Well,” he finally said. “I hope nobody’s thirsty.”

Even as he said the words, his throat cracked, and he wondered how long they’d been unconscious. 

There was a long pause, before Steve spoke up. “All right, we need options.” He glanced around expectantly, at the same time as Clint glanced at Natasha and Thor glanced at Bruce and Natasha glanced at Steve and Bruce glanced at Tony.

Tony merely shook his head. “I’m open to suggestions, Cap, but right now our options seem to be either escape or reenact the Holy Grail scene from Indiana Jones.” He paused. “Have you seen that yet, because it’s a crime if—”

“I don’t even see a door in this place,” Bruce murmured. “Or windows, or anything.”

“I believe that’s because we are underground.” Thor tilted his head up at the ceiling.

Clint frowned. “How d’you know that?”

Thor gestured vaguely in the air.

“Well, whatever you think of, think of it soon,” Natasha said. She pointed. “‘Cause that water’s rising pretty fast.” Her voice was even, but the water—or  _ whatever  _ it was—was not, churning and bubbling as it rose ever higher, already a good few inches deep. The corner where they had been was even deeper, the remains of their wrist bindings floating up and down in enough water to fill a kiddie pool. As Clint watched, the material hissed and burned away into nothing.

“Trust me, we’re trying,” Tony said, his voice uncharacteristically strained. His fingers tapped together and his gaze kept darting from the walls to the floor to the ceiling as though calculating measurements, but he remained silent after that, the surest sign that for once he  _ didn’t  _ have an instant solution.

“We could cover the drains?” Steve offered halfheartedly, but Bruce was already shaking his head.

“With what? They didn’t leave us with anything except our clothes, and those would burn in seconds.”

“I bet the shield wouldn’t,” Tony remarked, frowning at Steve. “Any chance you’ve been hiding it in your shirt this whole time?”

Steve shook his head. “It’s at the Tower. With your suit, and Thor’s hammer, and Clint’s bow—”

“Can’t you summon the hammer?” Natasha asked.

Thor stretched out an arm and waited, but minutes passed with nothing happening. Finally, he lowered it to his side again. “I fear it is too far away. Wherever it is our enemies brought us, they made sure it wouldn’t be somewhere we could easily escape.”

“I don’t mind not having an  _ easy  _ escape,” Clint said. “I’d take an intermediate. Or an average. I just don’t want an  _ impossible _ .”

“This isn’t impossible,” Steve said firmly, but it was hard to believe even the words of Captain America when the water level had now risen enough to start lapping against the sides of their platform. Everyone eyed it warily for a moment before sliding their feet as far away from the edge as they could.

A few more minutes passed, and then the outer edge of the platform was submerged. The six of them crowded closer together, but no one said a word, as though speaking their fear aloud would only hasten its arrival.

The platform shrank and shrank, slowly but surely, until Clint was pressed in between Steve’s chest and Nat’s shoulder, and Thor and Tony were both slipping on the edge, and he couldn’t even see Bruce anymore because there was no space and they were all practically on top of each other and someone was stepping on his feet and there were panicked breaths in his ears and still. The water. Kept rising.

“If this gets much smaller—” Steve gasped, and Tony let out a helpless laugh from where he was squeezed so close to Thor that the Asgardian had to lift his head to keep his chin from brushing Tony’s hair. 

“Thank you, Captain Obvious.” There was a pause, as Tony apparently made a decision on what he was going to say. “You know, somebody’s going to have to go in the water—I don’t want to say  _ eventually  _ because that implies we’re actually gonna have time—and if they  _ fall  _ in… I mean, splashing is a definite concern.”

Every time Clint thought he was familiar with how Tony Stark’s mind worked, the man threw him for another loop. “We aren’t pushing anybody into the water, Stark.”

Water sloshed behind him and he stepped farther upward, nearly catching Natasha.

“I know that.” Tony looked affronted. “I just meant I’m closest to the edge anyway—”

“ _ No. _ ” Clint wasn’t sure who spoke first; it seemed all five of them hadn’t stopped to think.

“If anyone is going into the water, it will be me,” Thor continued. Clint closed his eyes. “I don’t think any of you will disagree with me when I say I am taking up the most space, and I probably have the greatest chance of withstanding—”

“Stop, stop,” Bruce interrupted. “If we’re talking about this logically… I mean, I can’t die—”

“Yeah, because a visit from the Other Guy is exactly what we need in this situation,” Natasha snapped. “ _ No. _ ”

Steve shook his head. “Look, I should—”

“Don’t even finish that sentence—” Tony started, and suddenly everyone was talking over each other—literally, as they were all still standing close enough to feel each other’s breaths on their skin—their voices rising with the water that lapped farther and farther up the edges of the platform.

Clint couldn’t keep his eyes closed any longer—it wasn’t in his nature, in his training—but everywhere around him was chaos—chaos and fear, even if most of them didn’t want to admit it, even if most of the fear (evidently) wasn’t for themselves but for the others—so he turned his gaze up to the only clear place left.

Up at the ceiling.

The dark, empty, void.

The calm of the storm.

The…  _ hold up. _

“Guys,” Clint tried, but nobody heard. “Nat.”

The blur of red curls in his peripheral vision whipped around, and immediately she was following his gaze up to the ceiling.

Or, more specifically, to the vent located in said ceiling.

“It’ll be easy enough to open from the outside,” he muttered, still staring up at it. “But problem is, it’s too high to—”

“Boost me up.”

Clint blinked. “Seriously?”

“You heard me.” Natasha shrugged. “Just like in Morocco.”

“As I remember it, that didn’t end well for—”

“Barton.”

Clint bent down as far as he could in the cramped space he’d wedged himself in and held his hands out in front of him. A second later, Natasha was climbing up and bracing her arms on his shoulders, shifting to her palms as he steadied himself.

This effectively caught the attention of the other four Avengers, who stopped arguing in trailed-off confusion, but Clint was focused on his next step, which was lifting Natasha as high as she could go—which was— _ almost—come on—so close— _

Natasha reached, but her fingers clutched empty air. 

“You’re way too low,” Bruce observed.

“Yeah, thanks for that, we didn’t realize,” Clint said through gritted teeth. Under normal circumstances, this would’ve been as easy as anything else a mission required, but after being kidnapped—and whoever it had been, they definitely hadn’t handled with care—tied up, and tossed in a dark cell, he wasn’t exactly at one hundred percent. He wasn’t really even at eighty percent, but that wasn’t the kind of thing you admitted when Thor and Captain America were in the room.

He couldn’t see her, but he could picture perfectly the frown Natasha was making. “I could jump—”

That was enough to signal another chorus of “ _ No _ .” 

“If you fall, that’s it,” Steve said. “And I think we’ve had this discussion already.”

“You wouldn’t be able to jump high enough anyway,” Tony added. “Unless you’ve got hidden superpowers you decided not to tell us about.”

“Alright, alright, I get it.” Natasha sighed. “Let me down—and don’t drop me.” She shot a sharp look down at Clint.

“Um. Problem.” Clint didn’t think there was any way for the team to get more stressed out, but turned out those words did the trick. He made no move to lower Natasha. “You might not—want me to let you down.”

Natasha’s face flashed with confusion for a brief moment before her eyes found the floor of the platform and widened. “Yeah, maybe don’t do that.”

“What—oh.” Tony backed almost into Bruce, who barely stopped himself from knocking against Thor. “This is… not good.”

Because the water was still rising, and now half the room was submerged. 

Clint pressed inward—still carrying Natasha—but so did everyone else, and the amount of platform left was rapidly diminishing. The vent in the ceiling was looking more and more like a ray of hope… but a ray of hope fifteen feet out of reach.

“There has to be something we can do,” Bruce said, staring down at the water as though he still didn’t believe it was there. “Maybe those of us who might be able to survive the water—”

“I have an idea.”

Everyone stared at Thor, who quickly corrected himself.

“Well, it isn’t my idea. Not really. But as long as it works.” He was somehow managing to still appear calm through all of this, even as (albeit fading) bruises still marked his skin and his hammer was missing from his side.

They waited for a moment longer for an explanation, but apparently Thor was done.

“We’re all ears—” Clint started, just as a sort of prompt, but then he found himself being very suddenly and forcefully lifted in the air, which first of all had not happened since he was eight, and second of all was not a pleasant thing to have happen at  _ any _ age, and especially not when it was happening in a pitch-dark cell inches away from a burning painful death. 

Thor’s arms were now wrapped tightly around his legs, and Clint could just see his a-little-too-close-to-a-smirk expression when he leaned his head all the way down. And Clint himself was still holding up Natasha, who had swayed and grabbed onto the nearest solid object (Clint’s shoulder) to steady herself at Thor’s… well, this was his plan, wasn’t it?

There were so many things Clint wanted to say. So many things. 

He settled for: “Stark, I swear if you laugh—”

“Nope.” Tony shook his head very quickly, even as his hand came up to cover his mouth. “Would never dream of it.”

“Can you open the vent now?” Thor called up to Natasha, who was already straining to reach. She was significantly higher up than last time, but it still wasn’t enough. She shook her head before remembering that Thor couldn’t see her and shouted down a “no!”

Clint felt himself lower infinitesimally as Thor’s shoulders slumped. “So is this us exhausting all of our options?” he asked. “Because that’s what this feels like.”

Steve glanced from Clint to the water to the empty stretch of air between Natasha and the ceiling vent, his face settling into a very determined look. The kind of look that won world wars and punched dictators ( _ I mean… it’s really his fists that punch the dictators, but I’m sure the righteous conviction has something to do with it _ ). He turned to Tony, but didn’t even need to say a word—Tony was already holding up his hands and no doubt would have backed away had there been any room to do so.

“Sorry, Cap, not that I don’t cherish our blossoming friendship, but there are some lines we just don’t cr—WHOA!”

A split second later, Tony was lifted to Clint’s height as Steve hoisted him up. There was a brief moment of panicked wobbling, but fortunately, Tony found something to grab onto.

Unfortunately, that something was the front of Clint’s shirt.

“I’ll be shocked if we come out of this with any boundaries,” Clint muttered. Tony muttered something sarcastic and indecipherable back, but didn’t remove his hand.

“How about we settle for coming out of this alive?” Steve asked from where he now stood face to face with Thor. The platform was almost completely swallowed by the water now, and Bruce was forced to practically stand on Thor’s boots.

“Still can’t reach!” Natasha called. “If there’s a second part to this plan, now would be the time!”

“More like the third part, but okay.” Thor shifted the weight in his arms slightly, which would have been fine if the weight in his arms hadn’t been Clint, who almost lost his balance before being steadied by Tony. “Banner! I believe the phrase is ‘you’re up?’”

Bruce needed a second to process before his mouth actually opened in shock. “What? I— _ what? _ ” He started shaking his head. “No. Absolutely not.”

“Listen, Bruce, you have two choices,” Tony called. “Either you get your ass up here and help, or stay down there and see if the big guy wants to offer his version of help.”

“He wouldn’t fit. Thor and Steve and I barely fit.”

“Exactly why option one was voted option one.”

“This is a horrendously bad idea,” Bruce protested, but as yet another few inches of the platform were lost to the water, he took a deep breath and allowed Steve to haul him upward. 

Clint wasn’t worried for Steve and Thor, who he’d personally seen toss motorcycles and the universe’s most unliftable carpentry tool, respectively, but he did feel a flash of doubt in how thought-through Thor’s plan was when Tony carefully circled his arms around Bruce after Steve passed him off.

“Okay. This is the tricky part.” Tony forced Clint to make eye contact, even as their precarious little setup wobbled ever so slightly. 

“Oh, just this?”

“Just, whatever you do—do not let go.”

After Tony finished speaking, there was a sudden very rapid trade-off that Clint was sure would have ended with at least two or three people plunging into the water below had someone even breathed wrong, but when it was done, he and Tony had combined forces to hold Bruce up, and Bruce was doing his best to lift Natasha, who was now  _ very very high  _ and  _ oh god it’s one thing to be this high on a structure made of stone and steel or even wire but it is quite another when the structure is made of  _ people—

Clint could feel his arms start to shake, and when he looked, Tony’s eyes were closed and mouth pressed shut, and the water was sloshing higher and higher and any moment it would reach Thor’s and Steve’s feet, and oh  _ shit  _ if Bruce transformed right now—he  _ better  _ not transform right now—

—and Natasha’s hand gripped onto the metal bars of the vent, and pulled it open.

  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
